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Piped transmissions from Alec link me to this story on GI.biz, in which ActiBlizz ultraboss Bobby Kotick, talking to the FT, says he wants to support the PC, primarily because it is an open platform. This comes as part of getting grumpy with Xbox Live taking money for people basically just playing Call Of Duty. “Mr Kotick sees an opportunity to break the consoles’ “walled gardens with new gamer-friendly PCs, designed to be plugged into the television,” says the FT report. “Activision will “very aggressively” support efforts by Dell and HP to connect PCs to TVs.”

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It isn’t totally pointless as part of GamesIndustry.biz “unique selling point” is that it has a database of industry contacts – registration helps them build this up (whereas other sites can just get away with lots of page impressions). It also helps make comment threads on that site different from those on the Eurogamer sister site, for example – eg people use their real names and who they work for next to their comments, meaning that discussions there carry a lot more ‘weight’. You need to sign up to see what I am talking about for yourself – it isn’t just yet another identical videogaming site.

You might have noticed when you were signing up for an account that there are four types of registration:

industry, freelance, student, consumer

…someone who just wants to read an article (like myself) is going to sign up to the last category. GI.biz is owned by Eurogamer who have plenty of other sites if they just want maximum eyeballs rather than a niche audience.

Sounds straightforward enough to me, companies make games to make money. I think more games with subscription models, and streaming data from the internet, like the Ubisoft thing. None of the platform-holder fees, none of the piracy, all of the profit. Activision might even have the ken to make games that justify always being connected to the internet, too. Here’s hoping.

Not the old “PCs as consoles” thing again? A PC is not a console and plugging it into a telly wont make it so.

A console is a fixed hardware and software platform which just works. PCs don’t just work. They are open platforms, which means they can be extended with all sorts of broken hardware and software. It also means that any DRM system you implement will be cracked. This is what caused the continuing DRM wars that have screwed up so many otherwise perfectly cromulent titles in recent years.

My main gaming PC lives in my office. It lives there, because it has a nice solid surface called a “desk” to support the keyboard and mouse that generally go hand-in-hand with the forms of gaming that the device offers.

My wife would not allow such foreign control devices to take root in my living room. And I would not wish them to take root there, since their posture demands are far greater than the “couch slouch” I have grown accustomed to with my trusty Xbox 360 controller.

Two different types of gaming in my book, Kotick. I really don’t care how it affects your bottom-line.

What I do want is a PC that is a little bit more like an appliance. Turns on instantly, just works, uses less power, doesn’t produce 450 watts of heat. What I don’t want is a tightly controlled platform with a limited homogeneous library of software.

* If you call it “tea”, and eat it at around half past six, you are almost certainly working class or of working class origin. (If you have a tendency to personalize the meal, calling it “my tea”, “our/us tea” and “your tea” – as in “I must be going home for my tea”, “what’s for us tea, love?” or “Come back to mine for your tea” – you are probably northern working class.)

* If you call the evening meal “dinner”, and eat it at around seven o’clock, you are probably lower-middle or middle-middle class.

* If you normally only use the term “dinner” for rather more formal evening meals, and call your informal, family evening meal “supper” (pronounced “suppah”), you are probably upper-middle or upper class. The timing of these meals tends to be more flexible, but a family “supper” is generally eaten at around half past seven, while a “dinner” would usually be later, from half past eight onwards.

Nick of course Solictors can be working class. Ever since the rediculous experiment to educate the lower classes, that the Labour government began in earnest in the 1950s, you see funny little working class people pop up everywhere.

Yes the “class” stuff is mainly bollocks* but I found this attempted explanation of lunch / tea / supper / dinner amusing. Personally I don’t even buy into the validity of the concept of “classes” in the first place, let alone mapping this onto contemporary dialects and word-usage.

I think they’re talking about a more streamlined casual-friendly interface, marketplace – the way consoles are. Something you can switch on and get in the zone immediately, without the clutter of your dekstop, apps, browsers, instalations etc. That’s where this “TV” talk comes from – simplifying and cattering more to the casual gamers.

At least I hope they’re talking about this, could turn out they’re just MAD and talking rubbish. :)

But really PCs would benefit from more such centralized interfaces/marketplaces, Steam and beyond.

I’m not sure about that, most of my friends who aren’t gamers or all that tech savy know they can hook their laptops up to their tv’s if they wanna watch a movie off their hard drive on their HD screen.

Seriously, this is just Kotick blowing off gas again IMO. I could be wrong but I doubt we’ll hear much more of it.

This could be just a ‘negotiating-in-public’ stance by him to get console makers to raise the devs royalty share.
It’s basically a warning shot at sony and microsoft saying actiblizzard can take their ball and go play for free on the PC if the console rates aren’t in their favour.
Thats how I’d guess we should read it.

Talking about new features – the new “3-features/headlines” on the front page is nice but the fonts are sooo small. :) The headlines are smaller than the regular-post headlines just below them, and the description text is super small and hard to read. Maybe you could tune it up a bit?

It is… but consoles are even more dead in some respects.
This latest generation of consoles has sold pretty badly; so badly there aren’t enough units to support the higher-end AAA game development costs. (“Red Dead Redemption,” a top-selling console game, was a bit of a disaster, financially speaking, for example.)

Seriously: If a game supports keyboard + mouse + gamepad, it can be used on a TV or on a desk. No big deal here. If anything Activision has behind behind the times with supporting gamepads (none of the CoD games have supported gamepads), and adding that in is relatively trivial when you have an Xbox version with all the mappings and acceleration curves already in-house.

Note: I’m not saying you should use a gamepad for everything (especially shooters), but if they want to get behind PCs in the living room, AB needs to put in the resources to make it work.

Even getting beyond the control factor (because nobody wants to play with a mouse and keyboard when they’re kicking back on a couch) I think Kotick is completely oblivious as to why consoles enjoy mainstream success: they’re homogenous, and that’s a selling point to mass-market consumers.

Every Xbox 360 has, approximately, the very same hardware under the hood. You don’t have to worry that you’re going to pop in the latest AAA title, and find that your drivers are out of date, or that you have to upgrade your video card. You aren’t going to have to install ten different matchmaking programs, from ten different publishers, each with different quirks. It’s all right there for you, from the start, in an easy-to-digest, let’s-get-on-with-the-gaming package.

I love PC gaming because I’m a tech nerd, and don’t mind all the fiddly things I might have to do to get my latest purchase to work. Upgrading is just something I DO once every six months or so. But Games for Windows already went down the path of trying to make things more straightforward and accessible for our less nerdy gaming bretheren, and its fail was most epic.

Trying to force the PC to be like consoles is stupid. MMOs and various marquee, cross-platform titles are good cash cows, and publishers should probably continue aiming for success in those arenas.

But if they want to expand their horizons a little bit, and tap into some unrealized sources of revenue, I really think they should take a stronger look at the indie and casual markets. They might consider them too small to bother with, but I still think there’s a real possibility to turn a decent profit, if you can crank out a number of modest titles, and develop them on a modest budget.

It works for movies, after all. Not every flick that gets released is a mass-market, lowest-common-denominator-friendly, cash-earning-juggernaut like the Twilight movies. And yet, the possibility of creating a low-budget sleeper hit that turns a tidy profit still exists.

I got a nasty shock opening RPS and having Kotick smile at me creepily. Jesus, that man is scary. I’m also wondering about these “efforts by Dell and HP to connect PCs to TVs”. Do they mean they’ll be shipping an extra cable with new PCs, or are they pushing to make “console PCs” that sit neatly nedt to your DVD player and whatnots?

There is a *lot* of PC loving from publishers and developers in the media lately. I also found this today: GamesRadar declares which console “wins” 2010. Their answer – the PC. Obvious page-hit generating flamebait of course, but still fun.link to gamesradar.com

Remains to see if all this translates to more good games, but I’m optimistic.
:)

If he wants to support the PC, why weren’t Blur, War for Cybertron or Singularity released on EU Steam? Why was Blur’s PC release so poorly promoted/supported that when I logged in on Saturday evening there were only 66 people online?

Well, there *are* advantages to hardware standardization (essentially an ‘open’ Xbox), but this still won’t happen. The Personal Console (PerCon?) manufacturer just won’t be able to compete with the existing consoles on price, due to not being able to sell at a loss / break-even and then make their profit later on royalties.

I’m consistently surprised no one has really pushed the media box thing – now that wireless routers are becomming so common, hooking up what many people keep on external hard drives to a media PC box under the tele makes huge amounts of sense. No consoles really quite get this right. Add in the ability to oplay all those PC games which would be fine sitting in front of the tele and we have ourselves a console killer.

Is a nice idea. Too bad probably is just a warning to the ones like Sony, like Mr. cliffsky say.

Talking about remotes. Something that could be fun, is a BOX, that you connect to the TV, and works mostly like a console, but is just a wifi conexion to your main PC. If is possible to make something like that, it will be possible fo r the PC to conquer the whole house, not only the central room, but any small room on the house (putting more of these box, all connected to the main PC).

Anyway something like that would cost about 250$ with taiwan hardware, and 200$ with china hardware.

The PC don’t want to be consolized, but consolizing it for a certain public, and a certain type of games is very doable. Theres already software that are already there.

And.. anyway.. why we call software “software” ? is a horrible name, we sould call software “electronic box” or “ebox”, since the important thing in software is not the software, but the user data.

I don’t get hate for Kotick, he’s just a businessman, that’s all. Why people don’t whine about any movie studio CEOs? Games are just an entertainment product, deal with that or play only obscure titles exclusively.

PC needs marketing as consoles do, and if they provide it then it’s fine by me. My PC has been connected to TV for 3 years already. And 2nd hand market on consoles also makes dent in sales as piracy on PC do, so nothing really new and different for publishers here except that they can go with some exotic subscription models.

“I don’t get hate for Kotick, he’s just a businessman, that’s all. Why people don’t whine about any movie studio CEOs? Games are just an entertainment product, deal with that or play only obscure titles exclusively.”

Businessman is not a “free exit from the jail” card, where you can do something awnful, and everyone forgets it. Nothing is. Maybe Lady Gaga and Maradona have a few of these cards, but no one else on the entire world.

Also, Kotick was very vocal about how to make the life of the game designers misery is part of his strategy.

He didn’t just say it might be hard work, he boasted that “we’re going to suck all the fun out of making games” which I found offensive both as a lover of good games and as a human being.

I see how “investor talk” absolves anyone of morality.”I propose we make lots of money by doing unethical things. Not that I would ever do these things, I’m a good person. I’m just saying the company should. You know, to maximize profits.”

I wouldn’t buy anything from this loser. He doesn’t care about PC gaming, he just wants BattleNet to take over the PC. Than BattleNet will be the Xbox Live of the PC.

He completely ruined MW2, put it under strict control so they could charge for overpriced DLC. They removed everything that makes PC gaming great. Mods, dedicated servers, server browser, etc, were all removed from MW2 so Activision had more control over us.

Yes, I’ve no idea on what grounds he criticises Microsoft for creating a walled garden when I presume he’d love to do that for his own products, and has indeed for the MW2 servers. It makes business sense to control access to software if you control the hardware, given how basically every console and Mac is also a PC in terms of its innards, and how little money there is in selling machines these days, from what I hear. Part of the reason Apple is bigging up its iPhone and iPad – it has control over every piece of software that people put on the machines.

Does this mean their PC games are going to be designed for a 15″ screen at 1366×768 resolution using a joypad and running on a laptop graphics card?

I suppose at the other end you have 42″ screens running at 1920×1080, full-on home cinema hi-fi quality sound, plus the new 120Hz “3d screens” and massively (over?)-powerful graphics cards?

The wierd thing I don’t get is that Bill Gates was banging on years ago about ‘connecting up’ all the devices in a house (fridges that know when you run out of milk etc). Also the current set of consoles were released about 5 years ago (2005/2006).

However not many people seem to have very “connected” homes where all their devices all “talk” to each other, nor is there much hype about the next generation of consoles. Or maybe I am just not reading the right websites or magasines?

Absolutely retarded, not only because consoles ARE computers that run games in your living room but also because computers already have this technology.
Sounds like snake oil, which isn’t very surprising to see from Kotick.

Thanks RPS, i’ve been looking for ages for just the right smile to explain to people what is meant by the term ‘shit-eating smile’. Blair and Miliband (david) both have it but this guy really shuffles that shit down.

Makes sense, you have to pay the console owners(as in MS, Sony etc.) respectable sum just to get the “privilege” of developing on their platform, as well as a cut of all the sales(quite reasonable, considering Consoles are cheaper to buy than manufacture).

On the PC, you have nothing like that. Now, if only publishers would start giving us OEM copies of games really cheap, and good DRM free versions for a higher cost. Or just abandon DRM completely, but that don’t seem likely.

Basically, the Dark Lord of the Evil Empire has caught the smell of potential money to be raked in by his filthy claws and here we have him, standing on our doorstep and staring at our PC’s. If you step closer (Don’t do it, you phule!), you can hear him whisper “These people are free? Free to play games as they will? Play MY games without paying a cent? Fuck that, how can I exploit this machine and make these morons pay… Hmm, how to find the shortest distance into their wallets? I must ponder this…”, as he rubs his hands together.

Hmm…this is a psychological tactic. Use the favored lingo of the day to immediately associate yourself with the feelings of said lingo.
Support PC because it is an open platform? Break the walled gardens of consoles?

Here we have some ultra-BS.

Kotick, I would say, is THE anti-games-as-art guy (in that he and his products counter the notion that games are art)…at least Ubisoft puts effort into their stuff. Kind of.

Yes, you need to make money as a business, but you can also care about your audience and make games as a labor of love at the same time (SEE: Stardock and several others, including our beloved indies).

The whole “businesses are there to make money” thing is CRAP…well, in the gaming industry anyway. When did that become the rule? Businesses need money to stay alive therefore they are for making money? Hmm…does not compute.
A little while after gaming hit mainstream and people like THIS JOKER, Kotick realized they could mine this sucker like oil.
He also knew we-at-large would roll right over and take it, and we have…and now the norm is mass-produced humdrum crap.
For example, Assassin’s Creed 2 just wasn’t good, it was barely okay. Yeah, it had good flash and all, but nothing in it had a soul…it was kind of fun, but that’s all.
Singularity was CRAP. Kinda fun mechanics…but it was criminally short (the norm now, sadly), was pretty cliched, and the twist was entirely devoid of life…another “oh here play the game our way but we’ll throw you this bone of perceived choice right near the end.” Even Deus Ex did that…but Deus Ex at least had a soul.

Right now I’m playing Crusader Kings (CHECK IT OUT if you have no idea what it is), and I had NEVER heard of Paradox Interactive before…but this game in a complex labor of love; so are its other games. They’re doing just fine in the money department…they don’t exist to make money.
NO ONE can tell me this isn’t feasible.
Nintendo started this way as well.
Blizzard started this way.
So did Stardock.
So did MANY others.
They were doing JUST FINE for themselves.

Who started in this business for the love of the medium? All the indies. Most of the companies. ALL the players.
Now what’s it come down to…this status quo of mediocrity and cash mining…what if the other forms of art did that?
Oh, wait…they do. Television? What I like to call the “Disney model” is the greatest way to create, use up, and dump young stars to make maximum money… and to brainwash the public into loving this cycle. Don’t even get me started on the music industry. Movies? Twilight…fanfiction for money. All these remakes and rehashes of property that are already guaranteed to make money; Iron Man 2 was not good at all, but it made a boatload.

What I’m not saying is that this stuff is not brilliant. It is…the money-making acumen here is ASTOUNDING. It’s also parasitic.

Mediocrity is the EASIEST way to make tons of money, because when you’re mediocre, you can maximize hype and marketing. People LOVE to follow the hype. We are sheep, it’s in our nature (not deriding it…in fact, I think it’s good)…but we’ve learned not to guard our hearts and our perceptions, and we have an open mind to everything. The unbarred and unguarded fortress of our mind has been completely seized by goons like Kotick. Where we should be appreciating art, we are appreciating slop dolled up to look pretty.

So, Kotick wants to support PCs as an open platform?
GET AWAY FROM MY PC…the fact that it’s an open platform is the sole reason it’s not completely tainted by this garbage that you ilk spews out.

Also…”He talked instead of a new breed of online gaming PCs that connect easily to a television, saying that Activision will “very aggressively” aid new programmes by the likes of HP and Dell to promote these. ”
This speaks of trying to turn it into a semi-closed platform…something Steam is already doing, but they’re at least doing it in a benign way (I still don’t like it, but, benevolent dictatorship and all that).

I just saddens me that (as far as I know) there’s nothing I can really do to impact the current state of things.

Instead I will pin my hopes on our indies, on good companies like Stardock, on good games with a soul that aren’t milked for all they’re worth, like the upcoming Elemental.
Honestly, without these who have built a great “kingdom in the corner,” this Kotick-stuff would already rule the day.

But Kotick’s smart…I’d say the industry is a game to him, and we are the pieces. With stuff like this he’s drumming up VERY good publicity; I guarantee you many more people now has name now than in years past.

I’d say Kotick is the Disney of the games industry…he KNOWS how to make money, and he is the best at it. Unfortunately, that means we get more “products” as opposed to games that are lovingly crafted.

Just remember this: the best way to lie to people is to give them exactly what they want.

All of a suddenly PC gaming has become a “bandwagon” as those who have been dong their best for years to kill it off suddenly realise how much money can be made from the platform.

However I see an even bigger threat to PC gaming than lameass developers who ignore the platform. If you go into any high street computer shop today you will soon see that Laptops have almost displaced desktops. The average punter no longer wants a PC as a piece of furniture.

The reason this is a problem is that whereas almost any PC could be turned into a gaming machine with the addition of a graphics card most laptops cannot be upgraded this way. I know that serious gamers will still buy their Alienwares or build their own but the barrier to entry for a new PC gamer is getting a whole lot bigger. It is no longer possible to upgrade your Dads PC to play games by adding a cheap graphics card. Now you need to buy a whole new machine.